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Julie Mertus provides one of the first comprehensive looks at the explosive situation in Kosovo, where years of simmering tensions between Serbs and Albanians erupted in armed conflict in 1998. In a profound and detailed study of national identity and ethnic conflict, Mertus demonstrates how myths and truths can start a war. She shows how our identity as individuals and as members of groups is defined through the telling and remembering of stories. Real or imagined, these stories shape our understanding of ourselves as heroes, martyrs, conquerors, or victims. Once we see ourselves as victims, Mertus claims, we feel morally justified to become perpetrators. Based on a series of interviews conducted in Kosovo, Serbia proper, and Macedonia, this book is one of the first extended treatments of the years leading to war in Kosovo. Mertus examines the formation of Serbian national identity, and closely scrutinizes the hostilities of the region. She shows how myth and experience inform the political ideologies of Kosovo, and explores how these competing beliefs are created and perpetuated. This sobering overview of the region provides a window into a complex struggle whose repercussions reach far into the international community.
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One of the first comprehensive looks at the war in Kosovo
"Julie Mertus has written the most informed, sophisticated, and convincing account of the struggle over the future of Kosovo. Anyone who wants to understand the ongoing Kosovo ordeal, or for that matter the whole class of ethnic conflicts, cannot do better than to read and study this fine book." --Richard Falk, Princeton University
"Julie Mertus has written the most informed, sophisticated, and convincing account of the struggle over the future of Kosovo. Anyone who wants to understand the ongoing Kosovo ordeal, or for that matter the whole class of ethnic conflicts, cannot do better than to read and study this fine book." --Richard Falk, Princeton University
"An important and original contribution to the literature about the break up of the former Yugoslavia. Julie Mertus reveals the competing narratives, the storytelling by which ethnic Serbs and Kosovo Albanians define themselves and their relationship to one another." --Eric Stover, Director, Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley
"Julie Mertus leads us on a fascinating journey through history, myths, identities, and ideologies deep into the thickets of ethnicity and politics that have led to the bloody conflict between Albanians and Serbs. Yet the author leaves us not with despair over the fatality of ethnic conflict, but rather with an understanding of possible ways to resolve what seems unresolvable. This is the clearest and most affecting account of the Kosovo war."--Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Chicago
Julie Mertus provides one of the first comprehensive looks at the explosive situation in Kosovo, where years of simmering tensions between Serbs and Albanians erupted in armed conflict in 1998. In a profound and detailed study of national identity and ethnic conflict, Mertus demonstrates how myths and truths can start a war. She shows how our identity as individuals and as members of groups is defined through the telling and remembering of stories. Real or imagined, these stories shape our understanding of ourselves as heroes, martyrs, conquerors, or victims. Once we see ourselves as victims, Mertus claims, we feel morally justified to become perpetrators. Based on a series of interviews conducted in Kosovo, Serbia proper, and Macedonia, this book is one of the first extended treatments of the years leading to war in Kosovo. Mertus examines the formation of Serbian national identity, and closely scrutinizes the hostilities of the region. She shows how myth and experience inform the political ideologies of Kosovo, and explores how these competing beliefs are created and perpetuated. This sobering overview of the region provides a window into a complex struggle whose repercussions reach far into the international community.
Julie A. Mertus is Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University. She is the coeditor of The Suitcase: Refugees’ Voices from Bosnia and Croatia (California, 1997), coauthor of Open Wounds: Human Rights Abuses in Kosovo (1994), and the author of Local Action/Global Change (1999). --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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8 reviews
19 of 25 people found the following review helpful
A bedtime story
27 Oct 2000
Format:Paperback
So, Slobodan Milosevic has been toppled.. Guess that means all will now be peaceful in Kosovo!
Well, no, actually..and this book will tell you why.
Written just before NATO's 1999 air campaign over Kosovo, Julie Mertus illuminates the process by which trust between Serbs and Kosovars became impossible. It hints at Phillip Gourevitch's reflection that "power comes when you convince your enemy to inhabit YOUR version of HIS story".
That struggle, each wanting the "correct" version of history to stand, lies at the heart of all Balkan conflicts of the last ten years.
Through innumerable interviews with the ordinary people of Kosovo, Serbian and Albanian, Julie Mertus reveals how competing myths came to be, and how they then contributed to an environment where terrorism and atrocity became - ultimately - a logical choice.
She does not go back to the mythology surrounding the 1389 defeat of the Serbian Prince Lazar at Kosovo Polje - the rallying point for Milosevic. (Covered already in Noel Malcolm's "Kosovo: A Short History). Mertus shows how events within our generation created defining national stories.
Two quick examples.
In 1990, thousands of schoolchildren fell ill. The ethnic Albanian understanding: they were deliberately poisoned, probably with Sarin gas, by Serbian authorities. It was proof of the evil Serbs would be willing to do to Albanians. The UCK (Kosovo Liberation Army) recruited youths with the argument that without resistance, they would all be poisoned again.
The Serb response to the same event was that it was mass hysteria at best, or at worst a deliberate plot by ethnic Albanians to generate international sympathy against them, the Serbs. It proved the extent of the Kosovars' untrustworthiness, their deviousness.
There could be no common ground between those views. Which story you believed, defined you.
Similarly, there is the case of Djordje Martinovic, a Serbian peasant who turned up at hospital with a bottle in his rectum and a story about being assaulted in his field by "masked men". Although later apparently recanting his story, and confessing his "assault" had been a botched act of self-gratification, for Serbs it became a rallying point. Dismissing the recantation as an Albanian plot, Serbs were only too happy to believe that this, the violation of an honest peasant in an act with echoes of the old Turkish practice of impaling, was the extent to which ethnic Albanians would not hesitate to stoop. Martinovic quickly returned to his original story. He remains on the list of Serb martyrs to this day.
Today, Kosovo remains in an effective state of partition, nearly all its former Serb population living above the divided city of Mitrovica. Without the presence of KFOR troops, armed conflict would be inevitable. It is not their religion, or even their language, that divides Serb from Kosovar. It is the incompatability of the stories they tell. Since this book was written, both sides have volumes of fresh grievances, accentuating their enemy's inhumanity and highlighting their own victimhood. These stories, nearly all with some grain of truth, are now being woven themselves into the complex fabric of national myth.
Brilliantly, painstakingly and without taking sides, Prof. Mertus has given us a vivid account of how events become remembered. She gives us the template to understand better all the intractable conflicts of our times.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
This book is facinating. I could not put it down!
17 Jun 1999
Format:Paperback
This book is exceptional in the clarity of the author's thinking. It not only forces the reader to confront the myths surrounding the Kosovo situation but also invites one to apply the writer's perceptiveness and logic to the myths prevailing in the reader's country, wherever he or she may live. The author's personal encounters with the people of Kosovo add a poignancy to her analysis that is all the more compelling in light of the current happenings there. I could not put it down until I finished it.
16 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Fantastic
5 July 1999
Format:Paperback
This is an utterly fantastic book. It gives faces to the conflict in Kosovo. Ms. Mertus does a fantastic job of describing the underlying causes of Kosovo. This is not a history book. This is a focus on the modern causes, the modern "Truths" which caused the slaughter and the hatred. Absolutely phenomenal. You won't find another book giving this much information on the mindset of the local population. This book deserves 10 stars.
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